The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  Till from a Rock he sees with wild amaze

  His Wife & Children perish in the Blaze.

  Stop Henry stop! and cautiously enquire

  If you can quench as you enflame the fire:

  Think on the Savage in my simple tale

  Who fires a Province, for a scanty Meal.35

  The coarse intellectual clay of Sydney was not for their shaping. They tried to catechize some prisoners but got little response. Then Thomas Muir, with extraordinary daring, contrived to escape. Early in 1796 he managed to contact the skipper of an American fur-trading vessel, the Otter, provisioning in Sydney Harbor. As soon as the ship sailed, Muir stole a rowboat and hauled out through the Heads, at night; the Yankees picked him up a few miles offshore. Months later, when the Otter reached Alaskan waters, Muir learned that a Royal Navy ship had been seen in the area. Fearing capture, he transferred to a cruising Spanish gunboat, which took him south to Monterey in Spanish California.

  From Monterey he made his way to the Caribbean, via Mexico City and Vera Cruz. He reached Cuba by the end of the year, hoping to work his way north on a ship to Philadelphia. But by then war had broken out between England and Spain, and the Spanish colonial jefe put Muir in the Havana prison for several months. At last he was shipped out, not to America but to Spain, on a frigate bound for Cadiz. Near the end of her voyage she was attacked by a British naval squadron, and an exploding shell mutilated Muir’s face and destroyed his left eye; he was so badly wounded that the British officers, on learning he was aboard, could not recognize him. So unhappy Muir was put ashore in a prison-hospital in Cadiz. But after several months, word of his arrival reached the French, and as an English Republican he had friends in Paris. Talleyrand negotiated his release and brought him to Paris in December 1797 as a guest of the Directory. There he remained, a gradually fading celebrity, occasionally consulted on plans to invade England; he wrote an account of his exile and wanderings around the globe which, although it was eagerly read and discussed in manuscript, never saw publication and is now lost. Muir died at Chantilly, in lamentable poverty, on January 26, 1799—precisely eleven years after the convict settlement at Sydney Cove, the antithesis of all his republican ideals, had been founded. His grave is not known.

  Two of the other Scottish Martyrs did not outlive him long, though they had no idea what had happened to Muir. Joseph Gerrald, the mild consumptive scholar, died of tuberculosis in March 1796; William Skirving followed him three days later. Both were buried in Sydney, and Skirving received the epitaph “A seditionist, but a man of good moral character.”

  Thomas Palmer finished his sentence in Australia, and went into the shipbuilding trade while he was serving it. He and his close friend John Boston—another “avowed Jacobin,” who had voluntarily come with his wife on the long voyage to Sydney to keep Palmer company—had little experience of business, but they possessed a singular advantage: the only encyclopedia in the colony. With it, they taught themselves to make beer. Then they learned how to make soap. Next they looked up “ship” and, after some trial and error, contrived to build a somewhat cranky but adequate small vessel for trading stores to Norfolk Island. It was followed by a 30-ton sloop, the Martha. Finally Palmer bought and refitted El Plumier, a decrepit Spanish warship, and tried to sail her to England via the East Indies. Near Guam, a remote Spanish outpost in the Marianas east of the Philippines, her rotten hull opened. The survivors of the voyage, Palmer included, were detained in jail by the Spaniards. Palmer died there of cholera in June 1802. The Spanish priests, hearing of his radical opinions, refused his body Christian burial; and so the most civilized and liberal-souled gentleman to breathe Australian air in early colonial days was buried among pirates in a common grave on the beach, until an American captain (himself a man of reforming opinions) took the trouble in 1804 to retrieve Palmer’s body and bring it back to burial in a Boston church.

  The only Scottish Jacobin who stayed on in Australia was the erratic Maurice Margarot, who managed to lead a shadowy, ill-documented life as a double agent between the various colonial cliques. He seems to have reported to Governor Hunter on the financial doings and political discontents of the New South Wales Corps Officers; and some evidence suggests that he kept both Grose, Hunter’s predecessor, and King, Hunter’s successor, informed on the conversations of his own former friends the Jacobins. King believed he plotted rebellion with the Irish convicts in 1801 and again in 1804, but he also feared that Margarot was reporting on him to the Colonial Office in London. In 1810, after seventeen years’ Australian exile, Margarot struggled back to England. He died in London five years later, wretchedly poor, and politically broken, disliked and distrusted by the friends of his former radical associates.

  Transportation had dealt effectively with the Scottish Jacobins. It would continue to do so with representatives of nearly every English protest movement, industrial upheaval and agrarian revolt for the next half-century. But first, it would deal with the Irish.

  v

  AUSTRALIA WAS the official Siberia for Irish dissidents at the turn of the century. Their presence there caused the System acute strain and insecurity. Rebellious Irishmen, known as “United Irish” and “Defenders,” had been sent out in dribs and drabs during the 1790s. But between 1800 and 1805 their influx began in earnest, swollen by political exiles transported for their role in the rebellion of 1798, when Ireland tried unsuccessfully to ally with France in revolt against England.

  Some of these men had been formally tried and sentenced to transportation. Others—most prominent among them was “General” Joseph Holt (1756–1826), the leader of the 1798 United Irish rebellion in County Wicklow—had surrendered under the promise of amnesty given by Lord Cornwallis and agreed to be exiled without trial rather than rot in prison. Others still had been bundled onto the convict transports without any form of trial; in 1797, the undersecretary in Dublin had been advised from England that “a light punishment for rebellion will excite revenge, not terror.… [Y]ou should transport all prisoners in the gaols and give full power to the generals.”36

  The Irish, on arriving in Australia, were treated as a special class. As bearers of Jacobin contagion, as ideologically and physically dangerous traitors, they were oppressed with special vigilance and unusually hard punishments. They formed Australia’s first white minority. From the outset, the Irish in Australia saw themselves as a doubly colonized people.

  The colonization of Ireland—the absolute ascendancy of Gall over Gael—had been going on since the twelfth century, when the first English Pope, Adrian IV, encouraged his fellow Anglo-Norman, King Henry II, to invade Ireland and “proclaim the truths of the Christian religion to a rude and ignorant people.” When the English knights landed and started hewing their red way through the Gaelic resistance, Ireland had been Christian for seven hundred years. It took nearly a century to impose the Anglo-Norman feudal system on the Irish clans, but by the end of the thirteenth century it was done. The puppet Dublin parliament, owing its loyalty to the English crown, would last seven hundred years and only be dissolved by the Act of Union with England in 1801.

  Throughout those seven centuries, no Irish Catholic could expect justice from its laws. As they tightened, so the rights of Irishmen dwindled; and by the end of the eighteenth century these “penal laws” reached into every cranny of the Catholic majority’s life. Under them, Catholics were legislated down to helotry. They divided Ireland, as Edmund Burke remarked in 1792,

  into two distinct bodies, without common interest, sympathy or connection. One … was to possess all the franchises, all the property, all the education; the other was to be composed of drawers of water and cutters of turf for them. Are we to be surprised when by the efforts of so much violence in conquest … we had reduced them to a mob?

  Under the Popery Laws, no Catholic could sit in Parliament, on the bench or in a jury; none could vote, teach or hold an army commission. They were disabled in property law, which was rewritten to break up Catholic estates
and consolidate Protestant ones. Protestant estates could be left intact to eldest sons, but Catholic ones had to be split between all the children. Thus Catholic landowning families degenerated into sharecropping ones within a generation or two.

  These laws cut across all class barriers. They beat the Catholic peasantry “into the clay,” as the phrase went, but they also gagged and paralyzed the Catholic landowner, the intellectual, the entrepreneur. Thus, they unified the Irish Catholics more strongly than softer laws could ever have done and voided the question of a class struggle within the Catholic ranks. Hence the fervor with which working Irishmen supported middle-class leaders like Tone and O’Connell. This breadth of disaffection meant that Irish political prisoners transported to Australia ranged across a wide social spectrum, from peasant to lawyer. In March 1800, Governor Hunter was complaining that far too many of the Irish convicts were “bred up in gentle life,” and successive governors of New South Wales viewed the Specials, or educated Irish convicts, with extreme wariness; they might “contaminate” the rank and file with their ideas.

  The expression of middle-class dissent from English colonial rule was the Society of United Irishmen, formed in 1791, an alliance of Dublin Catholics with Presbyterian merchants from Belfast, Down and Antrim. Its Ulster Protestant members had risen above their sectarian squabbles with the Catholic majority; they saw that English laws—especially, the crippling trade embargoes on Irish linen exports to America—oppressed them too. A free Irish Republic, they felt, was in the interest of all who made money from Irish resources and Irish labor; but what they needed was an alliance that cut across Irish religious divisions, taking its stand on Tom Paine and the Rights of Man.

  The United Irish movement spread quite rapidly among the poor. Nobody could call the Irish peasantry of the 1790s politically educated, but it had a great deal to be angry about. It bitterly resented enclosure and tithing, the bailiffs with their writs of eviction, the landlord’s bullies with their dogs and shillelaghs. The English looked to the priests to keep the peasants subdued, but the clergy did so, not out of any love for the English, but from a Christian dislike of violence and a fear of what the military could do to their parishioners.

  The seeds of rebellion were already there. Before the birth of the Society of United Irishmen was formed, protest movements had risen from the peasantry and been punished by prison, exile and the gallows. The Whiteboys or Levellers, peasant gangs who toppled the new enclosure-fences around old commons, appeared in Tipperary in 1761. In 1772 the Presbyterian Hearts of Steel tried to oppose rack-renting in the Ulster counties. The Rightboys, formed to protest enclosure in Kerry in 1775, were Catholic.

  Such country dissidents could not work together. In Ulster, whose population was roughly half Catholic and half Protestant, the Catholic Defenders and the Protestant Peep-o’-Day Boys fought pitched battles, to the amusement of their landlords. The achievement of Wolfe Tone and the twenty-seven other Protestants who founded the Society of United Irishmen was to merge the factions in one common goal of reform, a “cordial union,” an Irish nation-state. The English were quick to strike at these nationalist subversives. The first convict ship to carry known political prisoners from Ireland to Australia was the Marquis Cornwallis, which sailed from Cove in August 1795 with 168 male and 73 female prisoners. Of the men, “several … were known by the name of Defenders, and the whole were of the very worst description.”37 The Irish began to plot mutiny as soon as the ship sailed, and when informers disclosed the plan to the captain he had more than forty men summarily flogged. Two Irish soldiers who had abetted the mutineers, Sergeant Ellis and Private Gaffney of the New South Wales Corps, were flogged and ironed to one another with handcuffs, thumbscrews and rigid slave leg-bolts. Ellis died after nine days; the captain then unshackled Gaffney from his corpse and ironed him to one of the Defenders, leaving them bolted together for the remaining five months of the voyage.

  The Defenders continued to give trouble after they arrived in Australia. “Turbulent and worthless creatures,” Governor Hunter called them in 1796, promising to watch them “narrowly.” He had had to build new log-house jails “since it has been found necessary to send to this country such horrid characters as the people call’d Irish Defenders, who, I confess … I wish had either been sent to the coast of Africa, or some place as fit for them.”38

  There was good reason for their unrest, beyond the normal sufferings of transportation. Most of the Irish convicts already in the colony, who had come out on transports from Cork between 1791 and 1793, were doing seven years on ordinary criminal charges. But their records had not been sent with them, so no one knew how long they had to serve in Australia or when they were eligible for the tickets-of-leave that were usually given after four years’ good conduct on a seven-year sentence. In one case, it took eighteen years for the lists of a shipload of political prisoners (Anne, 1801) to catch up. “The manner in which the convicts are sent from Ireland is so extremely careless and irregular,” Hunter complained, “that it must be felt by these people as a particular hardship.” No wonder that the radical Defenders off the Cornwallis found a ready ear among “non-political” Irish convicts who were already in New South Wales.39

  It was taken for granted that all Irishmen were “wild” and “lawless”; and the authorities in Sydney, who had enough difficulty with the relatively tractable English prisoners, were never glad to see them. When the Marquis Cornwallis arrived, Judge-Advocate David Collins cast a cold eye on “Defenders, desperate and ripe for any scheme from which danger and destruction might come.” The Irish women were just as bad; they had plotted “the preparing of pulverised glass to mix with the flour of which the seamen were to make their puddings. What an importation!” Half-Irish himself, Collins despised the Irish prisoners: “They do not deserve the appellation of men.”40

  Tension in Sydney between the chafed Irish and the English authorities became worse when the Britannia arrived in May 1797. This hell-ship, one of the worst in transportation history, arrived with 134 men and 43 women, mostly Defenders and other agrarian rebels. Within a few months, they had persuaded other Irishmen to escape inland. Sixty of them were caught and flogged; two were hanged. Others tried again, and were flogged too, since in view of their “obstinacy and ignorance … I conceived that there could be no better argument than a severe corporal punishment.”41

  By the middle of 1798, there were 653 Irish convicts in New South Wales, of whom some 265 were political prisoners.42 None of them knew what had happened in Ireland since they had been sent into exile. During the year 1796, the Defenders had secretly begun to merge with the United Irishmen, and Wolfe Tone had gone to France to persuade its revolutionary government to send an invasion fleet to Ireland. Once it came, he believed, the Irish middle class and peasantry would rise together. The French landing at Bantry Bay in 1796 was a fiasco, however, and the English Tories unleashed a storm of reprisals, setting Orange against Green, Protestant against Catholic.

  The time was ripe for an alliance of Catholic and Protestant under the United Irish banner. In 1797 martial law was declared in Ulster, and William Orr, a Protestant United Irishman who would be transported without trial to Australia on the Friendship in 1800, greeted this as a sign. “All ground of jealousy between us and the Catholics is now done away,” he declared.

  [The English) have denied us reform and them emancipation. They have oppressed them with penal laws and us with military ones.… [T]here is nothing surer than that Irishmen of every denomination must stand or fall together.43

  The colony had reached its flashpoint, and late in May 1798 the United Irish, who proved to have a better military organization than the English had ever dreamed, rose in rebellion. The fighting began in Kildare and flared from county to county. By July, all Ireland lay under martial law. The first victories of the rebels—at Three Rocks and Tubberneering, Wexford and Oulart—were soon converted into heroic legend by the “treason songs,” to be sung in many an Australian humpy and
rum shop throughout the next century; but in the end, musket was bound to prevail against pike. The momentum of the ’98 rebellion was soon lost. Lord Cornwallis, the lord lieutenant of Ireland, wrote a heartsick letter to a colleague in England, asking him to judge how far worse the horrors of martial law became when that law was enforced by Irishmen, “heated with passion and revenge,” guilty of “numberless murders … without any process or examination whatever”:

  The yeomanry are in the style of the Loyalists of America, only much more numerous and powerful, and a thousand times more ferocious. These men have saved the country, but they now take the lead in rapine and murder. The feeble outrages … which are still committed by the rebels, serve to keep up the sanguinary disposition on our side.… [T]he conversation, even at my table, where you may suppose I do all I can to prevent it, always turns on hanging, shooting, burning, etc., and if a priest has been put to death, the greatest joy is expressed by the whole company. So much for Ireland, and my wretched situation.44

  Such were the memories transplanted to Australia on the next convict ships full of Irish Defenders. Those sentenced to transportation in the wake of the ’98 rebellion had left a gutted country behind them, devastated by fire, bayonet and the portable wheeled gallows, where whole counties looked like “the carcase of a goose, standing up.” So the authorities could be a little more lenient. If every United Irishman had been indicted for treason, they could all have been hanged—but the jurors would still have had to go home to their villages and live among those who knew the accused. Juries avoided capital convictions, and, an Omagh magistrate reported, “All the United Irish who were in on treasonable practices are only indicted for a lesser offence, so as to come under transportation; for that reason no objection lay against Jurors.”45